May 2007 Archives

I recently signed up for the voice-over-IP service of Call Centric. I was looking for a VoIP provider that would not cost much, did not require any long-term commitments, provides a good audio quality, and works using the SIP-protocol. The provider that I am looking for needed to support incoming calls to a US-number and outgoing voice calls to VoIP as well as non-VoIP numbers, using caller ID of the incoming US-number. In addition, I wanted voicemail, and the possibility to save voicemail to local files. Call Centric offers all of this, and more.

In combination with the X-Lite soft phone, I have found what I am looking for.

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© 2007 All Rights Reserved.

I picked up a WinTV-HVR 900 TV USB stick. The device connects to a USB port and provides a fully features analog and digital TV decoder. I wanted it to be able to convert a bunch of VHS tapes to mpeg and to record some TV shows.

Installation was problematic and it took me an hour or so to figure out that my Trend Micro Agent quarantined one of the main components as spyware. After I had determined the cause of the trouble, and I disabled the Agent so I could install the software, it worked like a breeze and I can now easily watch, record and play back all TV shows that I want to capture.

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In a post on Layer 8, shrdlu mentioned that she is an "INTP". This statement triggered my curiousity, and I started doing some research. After doing some reading on human personality types, I preliminary classified myself as "INTP", or "INTJ". Taking an online test confirmed that I am indeed, most likely, introverted intuitive thinking judging. It is almost scary to see how accurate these general personality type descriptions are!

A few days ago, I wrote that I was considering moving this blog to the Movable Type platform.

The transition has taken place and the blog is at its new location. Please update your bookmarks and feed readers to reflect the new URL.

The transition was entirely painless; I dumped the Drupal database into the Movable Type import format and I was up and running in no time. I'll be tuning and tweaking later, but for now, I am up on the new platform.

I am considering to move this website to MovableType. That will probably require quite some scripting, as I am not aware of a way to export my content to a format that I can re-import in MT.

If you have any experience with that, please let me know.

The reason why I am considering the upgrade is that keeping the current CMS (Drupal) patched and up-to-date takes too much effort, and because the performance of this site is excessively poor at times.

While I have not been able to pinpoint the problem, I suspect that it has something to do with the versions of MySQL and Drupal. If you are experiencing more than 5 minute waits between page loads on a Drupal system and know (or suspect) what it is caused by, please let me know too!

I have just updated my wish lists on amazon.com. The list that was there was not current and unorganized.

I have just replaced the block containing my blog roll with a list of blog items that I feel are worth sharing with the world. To the right of each page of this site, you will notice a block titled "Shared blog entries".

The block is generated from my list of shared blog items, which I maintain with Google Reader.

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ｩ 2007 All Rights Reserved.